Our 2017 champ will be revealed tomorrow, but I’ve been asked a few times how/why a certain movie was seeded where it was. One of our two semi-final teams (Space Jam at a 13 seed is ludicrous) was seeded far lower than most thought it should have been.
Last year’s Music bracket was seeded completely subjectively by Mrs. Optimist and myself. This makes a ton of sense because there is no real way to objectively rank music and bands. There is really more personal feelings and not many quantifiable reviews out there. No one really gives a band as a whole a “grade” for lack of a better word.
Movies are a little different in that aspect. After some back and forth about the better way to seed these movies, we decided to be as objective as possible. Honestly, looking back, it may have taken a little of the fun out of it for me personally, but we still got most if not all of the movies that were suggested on Facebook in there. They just may have been seeded higher or lower than I would have put them.
Method
When trying to find a way to fairly assess movies from different genres, generations, and budgets we thought of a few different ways and settled on reviews. Movies lend themselves to finding a mathematical best to worst because reviewers of movies do tend to quantify themselves one way or another.
Personally, I tend to agree with audience sentiment over professional critics’ feelings about movies. To get both of these groups’ reviews of the movies chosen we used the average score of the IMDb rating, Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer rating, and Metacritic score. There were a few movies that had not been scored by Metacritic. In that case, we took the number of “thumbs up” from Roger Ebert and assigned that score here as a percentage (4 thumbs up being 100%).
We kept the movies for the most part in the order they landed, but did leave some room for personal tastes. Otherwise, what is the point of running these things?! For example, Rudy (full disclosure – my personal favorite sports movie of all time and top 5 movie in general) was the #3 movie by average, but the top 4 Football Region movies were within 2% of each other, so I bumped that bad boy up to the top. Some movies were moved up 3 or 4 spots based on how many people were pushing for them on the Facebook posts looking for suggestions.
There were only two movies that averaged above 90%. Hoop Dreams was the highest rated at 94%. Rocky was the only other movie to earn an “A” with an average of 91%.
In short, we tried to keep it as objective as possible with a little wiggle room for personal taste. The last four movies without seeds are the movies that played in the two play-in rounds to claim the 16 seed in each region. Movies that are struck through lost in the first play-in game. Once again, thank you all so much for voting. Here are the results:
Football
| Seed | Movie | RT | IMDB | MC / Ebert | AVG |
| 2 | Brian’s Song | 92% | 76% | 80% | 83% |
| 4 | North Dallas 40 | 87% | 70% | 90% | 82% |
| 1 | Rudy | 80% | 75% | 88% | 81% |
| 3 | The Longest Yard (1974) | 81% | 71% | 90% | 81% |
| 6 | Remember the Titans | 78% | 78% | 75% | 77% |
| 5 | Friday Night Lights | 81% | 73% | 70% | 75% |
| 8 | Invincible | 71% | 71% | 63% | 68% |
| 7 | The Blindside | 66% | 77% | 53% | 65% |
| 9 | Draft Day | 60% | 68% | 64% | 64% |
| 10 | The Program | 45% | 64% | 75% | 61% |
| 11 | We Are Marshall | 49% | 71% | 53% | 58% |
| 12 | Any Given Sunday | 68% | 51% | 52% | 57% |
| 13 | Leatherheads | 53% | 60% | 56% | 56% |
| 14 | Necessary Roughness | 60% | 31% | 75% | 55% |
| 15 | The Replacements | 41% | 65% | 50% | 52% |
| Varsity Blues | 40% | 64% | 50% | 51% | |
| The Longest Yard (2005) | 31% | 64% | 48% | 48% | |
| The Waterboy | 61% | 35% | 41% | 46% | |
| Little Giants | 40% | 63% | 25% | 43% |
Basketball
| Seed | Movie | RT | IMDB | MC / Ebert | AVG |
| 1 | Hoop Dreams | 98% | 83% | 100% | 94% |
| 2 | Hoosiers | 88% | 76% | 76% | 80% |
| 3 | He Got Game | 80% | 69% | 88% | 79% |
| 5 | Cornbread, Earl, and Me | 95% | 68% | 75% | 79% |
| 4 | White Men Can’t Jump | 76% | 67% | 88% | 77% |
| 6 | Love & Basketball | 82% | 72% | 70% | 75% |
| 8 | The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh | 83% | 51% | 72% | 69% |
| 7 | Coach Carter | 65% | 72% | 57% | 65% |
| 9 | Above the Rim | 53% | 66% | 75% | 65% |
| 10 | Glory Road | 55% | 72% | 58% | 62% |
| 11 | Blue Chips | 37% | 61% | 75% | 58% |
| 15 | Air Bud | 43% | 51% | 75% | 56% |
| 12 | Basketball Diaries | 46% | 73% | 46% | 55% |
| 13 | Space Jam | 37% | 63% | 59% | 53% |
| 14 | Teen Wolf | 47% | 60% | 25% | 44% |
| Semi-Pro | 21% | 58% | 47% | 42% | |
| 6th Man | 23% | 56% | 38% | 39% | |
| The Air Up There | 21% | 55% | 38% | 38% | |
| Celtic Pride | 9% | 52% | 50% | 37% |
Baseball
| Seed | Movie | RT | IMDB | MC / Ebert | AVG |
| 1 | Bull Durham | 97% | 71% | 93% | 87% |
| 5 | Moneyball | 94% | 76% | 87% | 86% |
| 4 | Bang the Drum Slowly | 88% | 70% | 100% | 86% |
| 2 | The Pride of the Yankees | 92% | 78% | 85% | 85% |
| 6 | Bad News Bears (1976) | 96% | 73% | 75% | 81% |
| 3 | Field of Dreams | 86% | 75% | 75% | 79% |
| 7 | 42 | 79% | 75% | 75% | 76% |
| 8 | Fear Strikes Out | 82% | 70% | 75% | 76% |
| 10 | The Rookie | 83% | 70% | 72% | 75% |
| 9 | A League of Their Own | 77% | 72% | 67% | 72% |
| 12 | The Sandlot | 58% | 78% | 75% | 70% |
| 13 | The Natural | 81% | 75% | 50% | 69% |
| 11 | Major League | 83% | 72% | 50% | 68% |
| 15 | Fever Pitch | 65% | 62% | 56% | 61% |
| 14 | Rookie of the Year | 39% | 59% | 75% | 58% |
| For the Love of the Game | 46% | 65% | 43% | 51% | |
| Angels in the Outfield | 35% | 61% | 50% | 49% | |
| The Babe | 46% | 58% | 25% | 43% | |
| The Benchwarmers | 11% | 56% | 25% | 31% |
Other Sports
| Seed | Movie | RT | IMDB | MC / Ebert | AVG |
| 1 | Rocky | 93% | 81% | 100% | 91% |
| 2 | Karate Kid | 90% | 72% | 100% | 87% |
| 3 | Million Dollar Baby | 91% | 81% | 86% | 86% |
| 4 | Slap Shot | 81% | 74% | 75% | 77% |
| 7 | Shaolin Soccer | 91% | 73% | 68% | 77% |
| 9 | Cinderella Man | 80% | 80% | 69% | 76% |
| 8 | Prefontaine: Without Limits | 79% | 72% | 75% | 75% |
| 6 | Invictus | 76% | 74% | 74% | 75% |
| 5 | Caddyshack | 76% | 74% | 75% | 75% |
| 11 | Cool Runnings | 75% | 69% | 63% | 69% |
| 10 | Miracle | 80% | 75% | 50% | 68% |
| 12 | Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby | 72% | 66% | 66% | 68% |
| 14 | Blades of Glory | 69% | 63% | 64% | 65% |
| 13 | Dodgeball | 70% | 67% | 55% | 64% |
| 15 | Happy Gilmore | 60% | 70% | 38% | 56% |
| Kingpin | 50% | 69% | 43% | 54% | |
| Baseketball | 42% | 66% | 38% | 49% | |
| Stick It | 31% | 64% | 53% | 49% | |
| The Mighty Ducks | 15% | 64% | 50% | 43% |
The Clumsy Optimist 
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